Tom DeMarco

Tom DeMarco is the author of thirteen books, including novels, business books and a collection of short stories. He began his career as a software engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories, working on what was then the world’s largest computer. His focus began early to turn toward writing, with stops along the way in organizational design, litigation consulting, foreign affairs, and even a stint teaching undergraduate Ethics at the University of Maine. He has degrees from Cornell (engineering physics), Columbia University (physics), and the Sorbonne (linguistics and theater). He lives with his wife, Sally Smyth, in the village of Camden on the coast of Maine.

Titles Available from Tom DeMarco

Armageddon is about to happen, but it’s not what you think. This war is not going to blow anything up; it's just going to turn everything off . . .

Cornell physicist Dr. Homer Layton and his research team have stumbled on a way to introduce a tiny local variation in the flow of time. It seems like a mere curiosity until they discover that the stored energy in common combustibles is insufficient to make them ignite in altered time. The variation, the “Layton Effect,” is propagated on a magnetic field. When an international nuclear exchange threatens, they reluctantly induce the effect over the earth’s magnetic field, and the last two centuries of progress are suddenly repealed. In this Layton Effect world, cars and planes won’t run, bombs and guns won’t go off. The military cabal that had brought the world to the brink of war is desperate to find the Layton group and smash their effector so they can get on with blowing up their enemies. Now Homer and his young protégé’s realize they have to run. But where to go in this strangely altered world?

About Dark World Chronicles:

The world has gone dark. Nothing works. Cars and trucks and airplanes and guns and bombs are nothing more than paperweights. A mysterious disturbance propagated onto the earth’s magnetic field has the effect of inhibiting all explosions. It has repealed most of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, leaving the world as it was in your great great grandparents’ time.
The villain (or hero, depending on your perspective) who has made this happen is the physicist Homer Layton. He must be destroyed. And his stupid machine that injects the disturbance must be destroyed. Because as long as it is running there can never be another real war. That is unacceptable. Fortunes of treasure and innovation have been invested in war materiel, all of it now useless. Most people would like to have their cars and computers and televisions working again, but that’s not what really matters. What really matters is that governments cannot get on with the business of war. The power elites around the world have determined to track down Layton and his little colony of war opponents and smash them. Then the nuclear war that that was just about to happen when he turned on his damnable machine can finally get started . . .